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Netting Out NetBackup

Showing posts by Joe Pfeiffer remove filter
Can You REALLY customize your backup reporting product?
Joe Pfeiffer | 29 Dec 2008 | 0 comments

Pretty much every backup reporting product claims their product is customizable (including us).   Let’s take a closer look at this. With each backup product, there is a set of reports that comes with it. These are often referred to as “canned reports” or “out-of-the-box-reports” where, once you’ve installed, you can start generating these reports.  These reports typically are bound to a pre-defined timeframe (i.e. last 24 hours, last week etc..) and represent a pre-defined target (all backup domains, a tape library, a backup server etc…).
 
So, when someone asks “can I customize reports”, what do they mean?  What are they expecting?  The classic definition of customization says it’s  “modification to meet individual needs”.  Well, individual needs will most likely eclipse the canned report set – by a lot.  That is, generating reports above and beyond...

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Another Backup Myth: Consecutive Failures
Joe Pfeiffer | 17 Dec 2008 | 0 comments

My post on backup reporting myths sparked some interest from a colleague (Hal Uygur) so here is his favorite myth - consecutive failures.  A common question from backup administrators is “can you tell me servers that failed x consecutive times?”.  Across the backup reporting vendors, many claim that they  can produce such a report.  Can they?  Well, it depends on what is meant by “consecutive”.  Sarcasm aside, but this topic requires looking under the covers so that the advertised functionality meets the requirement.  Consecutive failures can basically be broken down to “consecutive job” failures  and “consecutive window failures”.

Lets start with the easier one - “consecutive job failures”.  This is simply a straight line calculation of looking at jobs for a specific timeframe and determining when x many of them occurred consecutively.  For example, if we look at...

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Backup Reporting Myths
Joe Pfeiffer | 12 Dec 2008 | 0 comments

Back in June at Symantec Vision we had a group that busts myths perform (we're not allowed to use their official name but you can guess who these "busters" were).  We love to throw claims (myths) around in the storage industry so I thought I'd debunk a few things I've been reading about lately.  Yes, I am writing from a storage vendor as well so take it with a grain of salt but this is an attempt to at least bring these claims to light and let you make your own decisions.

Real time Reporting
There are several third party products that claim to do this.  These products typically compare the most with our own Veritas Backup Reporter (VBR for short) but really this is a feature we compare with NetBackup Operations Manager (NOM for short).  Both the 3rd party products as well as VBR simply can not do true real time reporting.  The way backup data is collected from all these applications is by executing a NetBackup...

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NetBackup 6.5.3 at TSYS
Joe Pfeiffer | 09 Dec 2008 | 1 comment

Dhammica has a pretty strictly firewalled environment with Wintel based NetBackup servers (Windows 2003) backing up nearly a 1000 wintel, AIX & Linux clients with 20-40TB of storage.  They also have a large number of VMWare machines being protected with NetBackup. For databases they back up Lotus Notes 7, Oracle 9i RAC, Oracle 10g and MS SQL.  And finally for encryption they like to use the IBM EKM built in to the IBM TS3500 (3584) library along with IBM TS1120 tape drives.  Want to be as cool as Dhammica?  Get NetBackup 6.5.3 for yourself here.

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NetBackup 6.5.3 is Out!
Joe Pfeiffer | 02 Dec 2008 | 0 comments

Today engineering and support posted NetBackup 6.5.3 so anyone can go grab it right now from entsupport.symantec.com.  Head on over and get your patent-pending Exchange Granular Recovery Technology on.  EGRT (as we love our acronyms) happened to be the only new feature added to 6.5.3 so the bulk of the effort was spent on making this thing bullet proof.  The final version has already been running in production environments for 650 days across several of our largest NetBackup users so upgrade with confidence and let us know what you think.

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NetBackup for SQL Webcast
Joe Pfeiffer | 24 Nov 2008 | 2 comments

Do you have Microsoft SQL Server in your environment?  Then you should register for our webcast on NetBackup for SQL Server coming up in December.  It will be hosted by Brian Smith and Larry Cadloff - two of our NetBackup experts.  I will sadly be traveling overseas but if it's not at a crazy hour of the night I may listen in.  You should definitely attend though.  Definitely.

 

When? Wednesday December 10th at 11:00am pacific

What? Protecting Microsoft SQL Server with NetBackup

How? Register at https://www4.symantec.com/Vrt/offer?a_id=72029

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NetBackup for SharePoint TechNote
Joe Pfeiffer | 06 Nov 2008 | 0 comments

Larry, our expert technical product manager for all things Windows let me know this today: Due to popular demand we have released a technote (305549) that summarizes and clarifies the steps needed to configure the NetBackup 6.5.2/6.5.3 Sharepoint agent for granular recovery of Sharepoint 2003/2007 documents. Think of it as a “cheat sheet” that brings together information from several different manuals in one convenient location. You can find the technote at http://support.veritas.com/docs/305549. On a related note, if you are using NetBackup 6.5.2 or 6.5.2a, you should also have a look at the 6.5.2 Late Breaking News technote at http://support.veritas.com/docs/307880. This document lists a number of known problems with NetBackup 6.5.2 and includes links to other technotes that discuss each issue. All of the hotfixes associated with...

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Backing up Enterprise Vault
Joe Pfeiffer | 02 Nov 2008 | 0 comments

Check out the paper explaining it here.

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Exchange Granular Recovery
Joe Pfeiffer | 29 Oct 2008 | 1 comment

NetBackup for Exchange: Granular Recovery from Josef Pfeiffer on Vimeo.

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NetBackup in Dubai
Joe Pfeiffer | 17 Oct 2008 | 2 comments

The interesting thing about the people in the training is that most of them here are very young - late 20's to early 30's.  We're seeing more of that in the storage industry but usually I'm the really young guy in the room when it comes to industry events (props to Dan, Mayur, Erica, Lou, Stefaan, Matt and few other fellow youngins).  These people in Dubai though are coming up with all sorts of neat ways to use NetBackup to protect people.  Leveraging integration with the Storage Foundation file system + volume manager, teaming it up with Enterprise Vault archiving, using PureDisk deduplication on the backend for storage or on the front end for remote office, and rolling it all up for reporting in Backup Reporter. It made me see again that this is what make's NBU as a part of Symantec so different than anyone else - to offer a solution across all these areas without having a piece that's not as good (like a crummy archive portion or a single platform file system)....

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